He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Hallway
At her father's bankruptcy hearing the buyer of every Guidry note turns around and counts eleven steps from a cabin hatch to a rail; Jo signs his contract on the courthouse bench.
The lawyer read the buyer's name off a page, and my father's hand closed on my arm.
"Reese Cold Chain has acquired the Guidry Seafood notes in full," the lawyer said. "Every note, every lien, and the second note on the house."
We were standing in the courthouse hallway on Government Street, outside the bankruptcy courtroom, with a water fountain humming behind us.
My father had worn his captain's cap to a hearing.
He thought it made him look like a man worth saving.
"That's not possible," he said. "The bank told me the notes were going to auction."
"The bank sold them at a discount on Monday, Mr. Guidry."
The lawyer didn't look up from the page.
I was twenty-seven years old, and I had kept the books at that dock since I was nineteen.
I knew the number to the dollar.
Two million nine hundred thousand.
Down the hall a door opened, and a man came out of it with his coat over his arm.
He was tall, six-three at least, in a grey suit that fit him like it had been cut in the room.
He was Black, with close-cropped hair and a plain steel watch, and he walked like a man who had never once been late.
He stopped ten feet from us.
My father made a small sound in his throat.
"Mr. Guidry," the man said.
"Do I know you?"
"No."
The man's eyes went past him and landed on me.
They were very dark, and very steady, and they did not leave my face.
"But I know you," he said, to me. "Miss Guidry."
Nobody had called me Miss Guidry in years.
"I counted eleven steps from the cabin hatch to the rail," he said. "You were eleven years old. I have not forgotten one of them."
The water fountain hummed.
Beside me my father went white, the way old paper goes white, from the edges in.
He said nothing.
My father, who could talk a bank manager out of a foreclosure in a parking lot, said nothing at all.
I looked at the man in the grey suit.
Then I looked at my father.
I had known since I was fourteen what the deckhand houses were.
I had known what the bunkhouses behind the ice house were for, and who slept in them, and how young.
I had known and I had paid for it ever since, quietly, in cash, out of a green cloth ledger nobody had ever seen.
"I'm Calloway Reese," the man said.
He said it to the hallway.
"I own the paper on this dock, the ice house, three boats and the house on Shell Belt Road, where I'm told Mrs. Guidry sleeps."
"My wife is sick," my father said.
"I know. I've read her chart."
My mouth had gone dry.
"What do you want?" I said.
The lawyer beside me took half a step back, the way a man steps back from a dog he hasn't decided about.
"Mr. Guidry walks away from the debt," Reese said. "Every note torn up. The house stays his. The dock stays his, if there's anything left of it."
"On what terms?" I said.
"On one."
He turned his head, very slightly, and looked at my father for the first time.
It was the look of a man reading a bill.
"His daughter keeps my books for one year. She lives in my house, on the Dog River, under my roof and under my eye. If she walks out before the year is up, the notes come due the same day."
My father found his voice.
"You can't buy my girl."
"I'm not buying her," Reese said. "I'm asking her for a year."
It was a lie, and all three of us knew it.
My father looked at me.
I knew that look, too.
It was the one he gave me when the boats were late and the ice house was down and he needed me to carry something heavy and not complain.
"Jo," he said.
"Don't," I said.
"Jo, honey, you don't have to do anything. We'll go to a lawyer. We'll fight it."
"With what?"
I heard my own voice go flat.
"Daddy, with what?"
The lawyer cleared his throat and held out a folder.
Inside was the contract, three pages, a pen clipped to the top.
It was my father's pen.
I would have known it anywhere, a brass Cross with the clip bent, the one he signed every bill of lading with.
Somebody had taken it from his coat pocket in the hallway and nobody had noticed.
I looked at Reese.
He was holding my father's pen out to me between two fingers.
I thought about my mother.
She was lying in the white house on the bayou under a quilt, with a heart that missed one beat in every six, and the second note on that house was in the folder in my hand.
I thought about a man in a grey suit who had said eleven steps, and why he knew how many there were.
I thought, he is going to ruin us.
I thought, then I want to see how he does it.
"I'll sign," I said.
"Jo," my father said. "Jo, no."
I walked to the bench against the wall.
Two lawyers, a clerk and a bailiff were watching me now, and so was the old man on the water fountain side of the hall with a cane.
I sat down.
I put the folder across my knees.
I read every word, because my father had never taught me anything else, and the terms were what the man had said.
One year.
His house.
His books.
Under the last paragraph there was a line with my name typed under it.
Josephine Beverly Guidry.
I took the pen out of Reese's fingers.
His hand touched mine for no longer than it takes to pass a cup, and it was warm, and I felt it all the way up to my elbow.
I signed.
I held the pen out to my father.
"Your witness line is next," I said.
He took it.
His hand shook so hard that his name came out in pieces.
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